Traditional wireless systems assume the availability of a contiguous block of spectrum with bandwidth proportional to the amount of data to be transmitted. Transmission systems are thus frequently designed for worst-case bandwidth requirements with the typical or average use-case, in some instances, requiring much less bandwidth (i.e., spectrum).
Within the context of satellite communications systems and other point-to-point communications systems, available spectrum allocated to customers may become fragmented over time, which leads to unused blocks between allocated blocks of spectrum. When the blocks of unused spectrum are too small, it is necessary to reallocate spectrum among customers or “move” a customer from existing spectral allocation to a new spectral allocation so that the unused blocks of spectrum may be coalesced into a single spectral region. Unfortunately, such reallocation is very disruptive.